On April 27, 2019, Dr. Zoubir Lounis, Principal Research Officer with the National Research Council of Canada's Construction Research Centre, was awarded the prestigious Ernest E. Howard Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The award was presented by David Cocke, President of the ASCE Structural Engineering Institute, in recognition of Dr. Lounis’ years of work developing innovative designs for sustainable and resilient infrastructure.
Dr. Lounis is internationally recognized as a leading authority in the design and management of deteriorating infrastructure. Some of his notable contributions over the past 20 years include breakthroughs in deterioration modeling, risk-based design and asset management, and design of high-performance infrastructure.
As core infrastructure systems in Canada and other countries begin to age and deteriorate, the demand for infrastructure life cycle performance modelling and life cycle management has increased. Dr. Lounis’ advanced mechanistic and stochastic models have been used internationally to enable reliable predictions of the life cycle performance of materials and structures, which allows new and existing infrastructure to improve their resilience and sustainability.
"Structural engineers can design inspiring, sustainable, and resilient infrastructures that achieve a good balance between environmental protection, social responsibility and cost effectiveness, while preparing for and adapting to changing conditions."
Dr. Lounis, the first Canadian to win the Ernest E. Howard Award, joins a notable list of past recipients, including Egor Popov, Ray Clough, Nathan Newmark, T.Y. Lin, Fazlur Khan, and Othmar Ammann.